“Mothers, go home to your children at night.”

In this one short sentence response we have victim-blaming, the prioritising of the child’s welfare over his/her mother’s, and some good old fashioned ‘this wouldn’t have happened if she’d stayed in the kitchen’ chauvinism.

If it’s not the articles softening their reports on rape that hurt the most, it’s the casual comments in response that take it upon themselves to lecture women for being in possession of a vagina and a normal social life.

Not very coherent, but I’m speechless too.

What we don’t have enough of is funding and buy in from people who feel terrible about crimes like this but who do nothing because they assume there is nothing we can do.

He succeeded at killing her so she cannot testify that she did not consent. As I wrote in my post once you drug someone then any sexual contact or activity which follows is a sex crime. If the criminal statutes in Alabama don’t reflect this reality then those statutes must be changed.

I’ve never been raped (thank God). Just last week, I was talking to a friend on IM, discussing another friend of ours with whom I only sometimes get along, and then he goes and says “You’re lucky he’s forgiving, he should have raped and killed you long ago.” My initial reaction was a shocked blink and staring at those words, utter disbelief. A supposed friend of mine, even in jest, basically just wished that another friend of mine had violated me sexually and murdered me. WTF?! Needless to say, he “mysteriously” hasn’t heard anything from me since then.

Seriously, though, I felt horrible being told that even considering I’ve never been a victim. Couldn’t imagine how much worse that’d be if I had been!

But of course, because of my silence, this guy correctly picked up on that he’d said something offensive, only to end up teasing me endlessly for having been offended. To him and sadly so many other people, rape, while wrong, isn’t a serious thing; it’s just “another irrational thing bitches complain about”. A prevailing viewpoint and Clayborn is just another victim we have to show for it. :(

UGH.

i was doing some research about the legal status of nigerian women for a case at work, and found things like a federal statute authorizing marital abuse as long as it didn’t kill the woman or disfigure her case, and the inheritance laws that considered a widow part of the man’s estate. and i thought about how much more freedom and rights i have as a white straight cis woman in the united states – i’m basically as free and liberated as a woman can get.

and to realize that the most free women who have ever existed in the history of the world have still had decided for them that “a woman’s right for her body to not be abused and violated matters more when she’s dead than it does when she’s alive” – that is awful. awful and vile.